Anyone who knows Eric knows that he writes about a little bit of everything

Shaggy caps

Comment

About this blog

By Eric Bergeson

Since 1997, Eric has owned and operated Bergeson Nursery, rural Fertile, MN, a business his grandfather started in 1937. With the active participation of his parents, who owned the business for the previous twenty five years, and his younger brother
...

Since 1997, Eric has owned and operated Bergeson Nursery, rural Fertile, MN, a business his grandfather started in 1937. With the active participation of his parents, who owned the business for the previous twenty five years, and his younger brother Joe, who is now president of the company, the business has nearly tripled in size during Ericís ownership tenure.
The holder of a Master of Arts in History from the University of North Dakota, Eric has taught courses in history and political science at the University of Minnesota, Crookston. He is also an adjunct lecturer in history for Hamline University, St. Paul, MN.
Ericís hobbies include Minnesota Twins baseball, Bach organ music, bookstores, hiking, photography, singing old country music with his brother Joe, and watching the wildlife on the swamp in front of his house eight miles outside of Fertile, Minn.

Here are two beautiful shaggy cap mushrooms, right at the perfect stage to be harvested. To harvest the entire shroom, I take a knife and cut about an inch below the surface. The meaty root is really the best part. There are so many in the yard that I have been discarding the cap, which sometimes turns to mush, and just using the root and stem.
Even after rinsing, there is a layer of humus on the roots which needs to be shaved off. I put the shavings down the garbage disposal once, which was a mistake, as there was a rock which jammed the disposal.
After cleaning a pile of shrooms, I cut them up, put them on a tray, freeze them, then bag them up in zip lock bags and keep them frozen until dumping them in the frying pan.
Both the flavor and texture of these mushrooms are far superior to the button mushrooms found in stores. The button mushrooms have the market because they last. If you pick a shaggy cap, you have only a couple of hours to freeze it before it starts to turn black and actually dissolve.
Shaggy caps are attractive to me due to their ease of picking and identification. I have about fifteen types of mushrooms in the yard right now, and the shaggy cap is the only one I am confident (without the aid of an expert) is edible. Plus, my brother Joe and wife Kae ate a bunch of them and lived through it, so I figured I could, too.